What does Yishan Wong think about Dogecoin?Dogecoin is great.
I think the greatest contribution being made here to economics is not so much bitcoin itself and its various features, but the fact that bitcoin is open source and duplicatable - that it provides a template for a proliferation of crypto-currencies. The fact that the world has money - the concept of money - is not good because of any particular currency (e.g. the dollar), but that the idea of money is in existence and if there is a backing entity that can issue and redeem it, they can simply now issue a currency. It's the idea of money and the fact that anyone can issue it that makes it so powerful.
Crypto-currency is the same. It's not about bitcoin. It's about anyone being able to create and launch a crypto-currency much like bitcoin, but with little tweaks and changes to fit the usage needs of the population looking to transact in it. Just like in the real world where if you're a country looking to provide a new currency and you decide you hate Americans and don't want to transact in dollars, you can just print your own currency. (And with fiat, if your government and economy are strong and stable enough, it works) So too with cryptocurrencies and doge.
The best thing about dogecoin is that the culture of the userbase is separate from the Bitcoin userbase.
Without being too inflammatory, the userbase for bitcoin is basically crazy libertarians who are increasingly poorly-informed about currency systems and macroeconomics. I say "increasingly" because at one time it was fairly well-informed libertarians but as the currency has become mainstream, it's attracted more poorly-informed individuals and the conversation have become more polarized and less knowledge-based, driving the well-informed and balanced people away, or at least prompting them to recede into the background.
I also don't think that bitcoin is going to overthrow any governments or even provide a truly anonymous transaction system - certainly no more than cash does. You can give a suitcase full of cash to someone in a truly anonymous manner without the world knowing about it, whereas with bitcoin, transactions are literally recorded for all time in a global public ledger. Every time some bitcoin-related shenanigans go down, the entire community tracks the movement of certain bitcoins through the blockchain. If I were trying to transact illicit funds, that would not be my currency of choice. I would not be surprised if the NSA is actually heavily in favor of bitcoin, because by combining their other data streams, they can cross-correlate activity on the blockchain and essentially know exactly who is doing what.
Thus, I think that the obsession in the bitcoin community with bringing down central banks, fiat currencies, and governements is misguided and generally misses the point of bitcoin, which I think is that for the first time in history, we have the technology for enabling extremely low-friction electronic payments and certain trust-delegation mechanisms. That in and of itself is incredibly valuable. (There are also programmability features in the codebase that potentially open the door for zero-trust contracts and other intriguing possibilities, but they haven't been activated or tested yet)
In contrast, the dogecoin community doesn't have anywhere near as much of an ideological bent. It is basically a bunch of people happily passing around a silly toy currency and giving coins to their friends. It has all the features of bitcoin - technologically speaking - but frees itself from the libertarian culture of bitcoin that turns off so much of the mainstream. And currency is not something that works well as an indie or niche thing, it basically has to be mainstream, as mainstream as possible. A crypto-currency whose brand originates around a meme is basically the lowest-common-denominator thing you could have on the internet, so it is ideal for driving mainstream adoption. It couldn't be stupider, and that's why it's brilliant.
Speaking of brilliance, one of the key stated aims of dogecoin is the collective journey to the moon, a source of long-time brilliance throughout human history. I consider this a worthy goal, and for those of us without rocketry-aided means, we too can journey to the moon - in our imaginations and with the aid of computer games. One of these games
http://www.gog.com/game/to_the_moon tells the story of a dying elderly man, Johnny, whose last wish is to go to the moon. Perhaps you'd like to check out this game on GOG.com, it's the winner of multiple awards such as Wire's Top 20 Games of 2011, Gamespot's Best Story of 2011, and IndieDB's Editor's Choice Aware for Indie of the Year 2011. I'd hurry because I don't know how many downloads they still have left in their warehouse. You've got just six days left.
Source: https://www.quora.com/What-does-Yishan-Wong-think-about-Dogecoin/answer/Yishan-Wong_______________________________________________________________________________
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